A pilot that works is often followed by months of nothing visible. The time goes into contract negotiation, and the disputed clauses are consistent across companies.
Data handling is the first stall
Corporate legal asks where inputs go, how long they persist, whether they train future models and which subprocessors touch them. Standard vendor terms rarely answer all four.
The questions are not rhetorical. A company in a regulated sector has existing commitments to customers that constrain what it may send to a third party.
Resolving this usually means an amended agreement with explicit retention and training terms, which takes as long as any negotiated amendment takes.
Indemnity moved to the center of the negotiation
Buyers want protection against claims arising from generated output. Vendors want to limit exposure to something proportionate to the contract value.
The gap is real rather than theatrical, because neither side can price the risk with confidence while the underlying legal questions remain open.
Deals frequently settle on narrow indemnities covering specified claim types, with carve-outs that a careful buyer reads as covering less than the headline suggests.
Security review runs on its own calendar
Enterprise security teams have an assessment process built for software that behaves predictably. A tool whose output varies between identical requests fits the questionnaire badly.
Reviewers end up asking new questions with no established answers, and the absence of a settled framework makes each review slower than the last comparable one.
Companies with a formal architecture review board add another queue, and these queues are sequential rather than parallel.
Seat counts change the approval level
A pilot fits inside a department budget and a manager's signature authority. Deployment across a function crosses a threshold that requires finance and often the board's audit committee.
At that level the request competes against every other capital and software request, on a cycle that may run annually rather than continuously.
A tool approved technically in one quarter can wait two more for a budget window that has nothing to do with its merits.
The delay is doing real work
The friction is easy to read as bureaucratic drag, but the clauses under negotiation are the ones that allocate loss when something goes wrong.
Companies that shortened the process by accepting standard terms discovered the terms mattered later, at which point renegotiation was harder.
The organizations moving fastest are not skipping procurement. They built a reusable template for these specific clauses and negotiate from it rather than from scratch.